Social media is providing more and more relevant information about individual users and their habits. As a result, more money and time is being invested in data mining the vast amount of data on social media websites. One type of social media is the use of short texts in the form of a microblog also known as a “tweet” from Twitter®. Identifying a location associated with “tweets” can provide valuable information regarding which topics of conversation are occurring in which geographic regions.
Currently, most location prediction methods provide location information of tweets relative to a known landmark or some other geographical asset. However, many times users may be in a location that has no famous landmark or geographical asset. In such a scenario, some user interfaces for mobile devices may ask for the recording of global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of the user. However, these coordinates are collected only for a small subset of the tweets and previous location prediction methods would not be sufficient.